Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Aaron and I bought Fable 3 and have been glued to it all day. One of the
first things we did was have a baby, but the nanny the game stuck us
with was hideous and questionable at best for a child care provider. His
traits included kinky, aggressive, and bisexual -- meaning neither our
son or daughter would be safe. So we fired him before he had a chance to
molest our virtual babies, only it didn't end well.

What we expected was that we'd fire him and a new nanny would show up.
Problem solved. What happened was we fired him and social services took
away our baby. I guess social services thought our baby was better left
to an aggressive, kinky bisexual than with two heroes of the realm. We
spent the better part of an hour trying to find her in the orphanage to
no avail. Tragic, I know. Had we found her, perhaps we would not have
become such murderous tyrants. Your fault, Fable. Your fault.

The game mechanic has changed significantly from Fable II, though it's not all bad. Simply... different.

You can now only access your inventory at your home base, where
items are divided by type and separated by room. This isn't necessarily
so much bad as it is needlessly time consuming. I can understand if they
were working from an immersion perspective, where you wouldn't be able
to carry all that shit with you, but considering you can instantly
teleport to home base from anywhere in the world, well, so much for
immersion.

I'm not sure how to give gifts to anyone outside of other players you
invite to your game. You unlock emotes as you go, so perhaps it's just
something we haven't unlocked yet? But it would seem odd I could gift to
players but not NPCs by this point in the game.

Shops have changed too. You no longer speak to the NPC running the shop
to open a shop menu where you select what to buy. Now all shops have
their wares on display. To purchase something you approach the display
and buy it there. There is sadly no "buy all" option so if you want to
buy a lot of something, you'll have to hit A a lot. This gets old fast.

One thing I found odd is that you can only have a maximum of two spells
equipped at once. One in each hand, and once you unlock the ability to
cast two different spells your only option is to cast both
simultaneously. You can't just cast one or the other. Not that it
matters really, as your mana pool is infinite. It just seems like a
peculiar change to me.

On that note, your progression (leveling up of skills, magic, and jobs)
takes place in some other dimension by purchasing chests with guild
seals instead of an in-game menu where you spend the appropriately
colored orbs on the corresponding colored skill. This isn't necessarily a
worse method of progression, just far less intuitive.

Then there's your emotes. Unfortunately you have little control over
your interactions with others. If you want to dance with someone, for
example, you may have to whistle, hug, and pose for them first (multiple
times over) before the option becomes available to you. You can't just
hit the d-pad as in Fable 2 until you find the one you want and then
execute it. This can also get old fast. Particularly if you need to
complete a task where a specific emote is required of you.

Lastly, they integrated the xbox Live store into the game, which seems
unnecessary altogether but a keen idea in the regard that readily
available content inevitably leads to more sales.

Co-op has definitely taken a huge step forward from Fable 2, which had
such lousy co-op it was unplayable. The camera is the biggest set back,
as only player 1 has any control over it and if they change it during
movement it doesn't detect the change accurately for player 2 which
sends them running off in some random direction -- causing them to get
stuck in terrain or lost. This makes navigating narrow spaces and
doorways a bit of a nightmare, but it can be done. Granted it's
frustrating. Teleporting to player 1 is always an option if you get
stuck, but there is a delay. The time it takes you to teleport to the
other player, you probably could've ran around whatever obstacle was in
your way. So really it just saves you some frustration, not time.

I realize some of that sounds really bad, but when you compare it to
Fable 2's co-op, you realize it's all actually an improvement.

Unfortunately your dog is mentally handicapped in Fable 3. He will often
bark to notify you of treasure, or a dig site, or danger, only to then
just walk in circles confused. It takes considerable patience and a lot
of wiggling around in one direction or the other to make your dog
actually go to whatever he's barking at. Even with advanced treasure
hunting. This is really my only true complaint as the game goes on this
glaring retardation only seems to get worse and worse to the point where
your dog loses all functionality and you are more or less guiding
yourself to buried treasure.

The only game-breaking fault lies in a certain area of the game where
the map does not actually correlate to the zone you're in. With the map
being 100% inaccurate, you're effectively lost, wandering around in the
snow blindly. Probably for aggravating hours. This situation is impacted
by there being several caves in the zone -- and you only need to be in
one of them. But you have no idea where they all are or which ones you
may've already visited because everything looks the gd same.

Otherwise the game plays in much the same way. X attacks with a melee
weapon, Y attacks with a ranged weapon, B casts magic, A sprints when
moving, you've got a dog, and so on and so forth. The quests are good,
your hero is voice acted, and the music makes you feel immersed in the
world. If it weren't for the fact that the game's presentation seems so
rushed and incomplete, this would be a definite buy. While I foresee
much time spent exploring Albion in our days ahead, I can really only
recommend you rent this game.

Friday, October 22, 2010

This is going to seem delayed, considering, but if we've learned anything it's that a) I am a slacker
and in general b) time means absolutely nothing to me. Perhaps I was
simply waiting for my opinion to be justified, but it's more likely that
I simply tried to block the experience out to the best of my ability.
Because honestly, playing it was a lot like witnessing a horrible crime.

With the news recently that worlds (servers) are being forcibly merged
due to population deficiency, I felt it was about due. Maybe because my
harsh review seemed more justified now than it did before? I don't know.
Anyway...

I'll preface this by saying, I could only stomach the game for roughly a
week during beta. Mind you it was the final build in beta, only several
days prior to retail launch so Square should've had their shit
together. I presumed they would take what they had with FFXI and
build/improve from there. That is not however what they did at all. It
seems that for some reason or another they decided instead to start from
scratch, rush, and then leave everything half-assed.

Let's begin with character creation. First things first -- this shit's
weird. The arrow keys will filter through your menu options and do
nothing to control the camera. For that you need to awkwardly use J, K,
L, and I. Why? I don't have any flipping idea. But there you go. You're
welcome. I probably just saved you a good three minutes of, "wtf???"

You have five races to choose from in FFXIV: Hyur (human), Miqo'te
(cat-girl), Lalafell (elf-gnome-thing), Elzen (elves), and Roegaydn
(man-beast). Each of those has two additional clan options with slight
variances such skintone and starting attributes, but ultimately it
doesn't seem to particularly matter a whole lot. Also some clans don't
allow you to be certain genders so the whole thing feels a little last
minute to me and I can't be assed to get into it in any amount of
detail.

Selecting individual features is pretty lackluster, with no color wheels
or true sliders to speak of. At the time in which I played there were,
for example: five height options, three voice options, anywhere between
seven and sixteen skin tones, between six and nine hair styles, and an
impressive thrty-two hair color options -- though most are nearly
identical to each other honestly, so you could probably half that. You
can further customize your hair by selecting a highlight color on top of
the base color, but honestly the lightning makes this process moot much
of the time.

For faces you can choose the basic shape of the face and then further
refine it by selectine eyebrows, eye color, nose size/shape, and so
forth. Unfortunately for some reason your face shape is directly
connected to your bust size if you're a woman, so you may choose the
soft innocent looking face only to get in game and realize for some
reason you now have a D-cup. The individual options aren't magnificent,
but at least they're there.

There are four starting classes referred to as Disciples of War,
Disciples of Magic, Disciples of The Land and Disciples of The Hand.
Which probably means squat to you if you don't know wtf that crap means.

Disiciples of War are fighters who can choose between Pugilist, who
fight with their fists and knuckle weapons; Gladiator, who specializes
in sword and shield; Marauder, who wields giant two-handed axes; Archer,
who clearly uses bows and arrows; and Lancer, who makes use of a lance.

Disciples of Magic are mages who can choose between Conjurer, who wields
elemental magic; and the Thaumaturge, who wields spiritual magic.

Disciples of The Land are gatherers who can choose between Miner,
Botanist, and Fisher. What those three classes do should be really quite
obvious.

Disciples of The Hand are crafters who can choose between Alchemist,
Armorer, Blacksmith, Carpenter, Culinarian, Goldsmith, Leatherworker,
and Weaver. All of which should also be really quite obvious as to what
they do in the scheme of things.

Incidentally, you can change what you are at any given time by
purchasing a new weapon, so none of these choices seem to carry any
significant weight behind them, cheapening your need to even make a
decision.

After you've done all of this you can choose your character's birthday
and patron deity. I still have very little idea what precisely these
options did, as they had no discernible effect on my questing or
storyline. But you can choose them, so I'd assume they intended to do
something with the system.

After all of this, you choose your starting location, of which there are
three, which I'm to understand is the key factor in deciding what
storyline your character progresses through. Despite being able to
travel freely, you can only witness the storyline of the city you
started in, so I guess this is truly the only real option you've been
given that matters. So I guess if you're really intent on hammering your
way through this game, means you should choose wisely.

On to the rest of the game, then. The game is quite pretty, as expected
of a Final Fantasy game these days, however from what I saw the story is
sorely lacking (also kind of expected these days I guess?). The quests I
did were very run-of-the-mill and left me feeling bored, even when
faced with impending doom. Go kill obscene amounts of ______. Go collect
absurd numbers of ______. And so on. The music left a lot to be
desired, particularly for a Square title, and left me feeling outside of
the world rather than a part of it.

The lag was a frightening experience itself, which strangely added more
excitement to the game than anything in the actual game on purpose. To
clarify, the issue was with the game servers themselves, not my
internet. I'm fully aware of the difference.

Monsters were never where they showed up in the world, and since most
were aggressive, this meant while slowly trudging along from one great
distance to another, you'd get attacked by something you didn't even
realize was actually in your path. Sometimes, the monster model wouldn't
even show up, leaving you standing there trying to fight something
invisible. Targeting was a nightmare and it had more to do with the
targeting box-size (tiny) compared to the creature you were targeting
(huge) than anything else. Though the choice to rely on software mouse
rather than hardware mouse certainly did not help matters.

In fact, without a third-party modification for that game to enable
hardware mouse, the game was effectively unplayable due to the effect
lag has on software mouse. The fact that Square so adamantly refused to
include hardware mouse as an option, forcing some random nobody to
create the mod on their own speaks volumes as to what's wrong with
FFXIV. Which, I suppose is a good place to end the review since just
thinking about the game just disappoints me all over again.

P.S. I know it's Square Enix, and many of you would like very much to
blame the last half of that equation for the woes here, but honestly old
Square could've put more polish on a turd and sold it, with half the
time. I mean, theyknow it's bad. Which implies they knew it was bad! They've sent at least two official apologies to fans, recognizing the poor quality of the product.

Edit: It should be noted at the very least, in an effort to make up for
the extreme failure, FFXIV is free-to-play and there are numerous
patches in development meant to correct many of the glaring flaws that
have existed to this date. I would say, however, that these efforts are
simply not enough and the release of this game no where near
completion is the rock-bottom to the recent decline of the Square
empire. At least there's no where to go but up from here?